Ah ha! I was gone for a week, and I bet you thought “well, we got quite the run there for a little while…”. Well, I’m back baby! Last weekend I simply had nothing worthy to say. Unless you wanted a 1200-1500 word screed on the entirety of Billions. Anyone? Anyone? Bueller? 

Once I’d completed watching the run of that rather well-done drama, it was time to dig into some shows who had their next season drop whilst I was occupied elsewhere. Top on that list? Amazon Prime’s adaptation of Wildstorm/Dynamite’s “The Boys”. With the penultimate season’s whopping eight whole episodes available, I let the blood and foul language bring me back to the fold. 

If I’m allowed to be a bit cranky? With two years in between seasons, all the nuance of the previous seasons has long been forgotten, and it forces me each time I start up a show again, having to ask myself: do I want to go back to remember all the details, or can I allow the show to just bring me back to speed? Well, call me impatient, as this time around I just hit play. As I recall, season three is the (spoiler alerts now, duh) “Soldier Boy comes back, everyone tries to kill Homelander, it doesn’t work, Billy Butcher is fake-mean to Ryan” season. Any and all other plots have long been forgotten. Save only that Victoria “head popper” Neuman was secretly evil-or-maybe-not, and that everyone was kinda in the dumps.

And that brings us right back in! Season 4 of The Boys can be summed up pretty easily: sad. Everyone is sad. Starlight / Annie is sad because she now leads an Antifa-esque group called the Starlighters and feels shame for her past. Hughie is sad because his father (played by the always awesome Simon Pegg) is hospitalized after a massive stroke. MM is sad because he’s leading the team and clearly doesn’t want to. Frenchie is sad because he’s always sad — but this time he’s sad because he’s allowed himself now to feel remorse for previously being a drug-addled murderer. Kimiko is sad because Frenchie is sad, and she’s still dealing with her personal trauma as a childhood super soldier, kidnapper, and murderer. Butcher is sad because he took too much temporary Compound V and is now terminally ill with a CGI worm wriggling around his head. Homelander is sad because he’s still essentially an invulnerable god-like being now surrounded by only sycophants and betas. Oh and he has Ryan, but Ryan and Homelander are both pretty sad they have each other. I’m sure I’m missing some other folks, but trust me: they’re sad too. Continue reading “So Long and Thank For The Fish, Man 95: Catching Up with The Boys” →